Tag Archives: Thursday Next

‘The Woman Who Died a Lot,’ by Jasper Fforde

Happy Labor Day, folks. Hope you had a good one.

It has been my fate in life to be one of those people who often observe their fellow men enjoying things that they don’t understand at all. Parties. All sports. Reality shows. Cheese. I’ve learned perforce the truth that my disinterest in a thing is a vote neither for nor against it.

I’d heard high praise of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. So when I got a bargain offer on The Woman Who Died a Lot, a recent entry, I figured I’d give it a try.

There were a lot of fun elements in this book. I did laugh fairly often.

And yet, I didn’t fall in love with it.

Perhaps I should have started with an earlier volume.

Thursday Next, as many of you know, I’m sure, lives in an alternate universe which diverged from ours (apparently) some time in the 18th or 19th Centuries. They live under a world government (not a despotism – nice trick, that) and she works as a special agent dealing with literary crimes. She has the ability to “read herself” into another dimension where the books we read, and their characters, are real. The stories abound in literary jokes, absurdities, and paradoxes.

But in this book, Thursday has had her wings clipped. Middle-aged now, she has suffered a leg injury that makes it impossible for her to make the physical moves necessary to change dimensions. Also, her whole department has been abolished since the discovery that time travel is impossible, which entirely undoes all the science they’ve been operating on up to now. This has left her oldest son Friday with the ultimate career frustration – instead of becoming head of the division and a hero, he’s scheduled to commit murder and go to prison. Also, God has announced plans to smite the city of Swindon (which, as far as I can figure out, does London’s job in this universe) for its sins, and Thursday’s genius daughter Tuesday – 16 years old – is obsessively occupied in trying to work out an algorithm to prevent it. And Thursday is finding synthetic clones of herself running around stealing her identity – literally.

These are only a few of the points in the super-complex plot of The Woman Who Died a Lot. To be honest, I found it hard to keep up. I felt insecure as a reader, not sure of the rules (no doubt a consequence of jumping into the series toward the end).

Also, how shall I put it? I have an old guy’s response to religious flippancy. In this universe, Thursday’s brother Joffey has converted the whole world to Theism through logic, establishing one universal church, which everyone joined voluntarily. But God doesn’t seem pleased, and has begun smiting places – His reasons are never entirely explained. Joffey’s church has become something like a collective bargaining organization, with God playing adversary.

Complicating it even more, Joffey is homosexual. I might be tempted to think that that’s what made God mad, but I doubt that’s Fforde’s intention.

Anyway, I did chuckle often reading The Woman Who Died a Lot. But I feel no desire to repeat the experience. Since lots of people like these books, your mileage is likely to vary.

‘Lost in a Good Book,’ by Jasper Fforde

Lost in a Good Book

“You’re the Cheshire Cat, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I was the Cheshire Cat,” he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. “But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it….”

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels were recommended to me by a reader of this blog. I found Lost in a Good Book, the second in the series, amusing. But alas, I didn’t love it.

The world of female Special Operative Thursday Next is an alternate one from ours. In this world England was occupied during World War II (though they beat the Germans at last), and the Crimean War went on for more than a century. The cloning of extinct species is routine, so that many people keep pet dodos, mastodons roam the land, and sad Neanderthals work at menial jobs. The plots and characters of works of fiction are not entirely fixed, so that agents like Thursday keep occupied running down truant literary characters.

When a nobleman discovers a lost play of Shakespeare’s in his ancient library, Thursday helps to authenticate it, but it’s not what it appears. Thursday’s husband vanishes at about the same time she discovers she’s pregnant. The people who abducted him pressure her to enter the world of Poe’s “The Raven” to do a job for them, in spite of known dangers. In need of money, she moonlights as a “JurisFiction” agent, helping fictional characters police their own under the tutelage of Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. And, according to Thursday’s father (who doesn’t technically exist), the world is about to end in a couple days.

The closest parallel I can think of is A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The action is non-stop, and so are the jokes. If you like puns, these books will please you.

I think my problem with it was that I’m deficient in a certain kind of imagination. I want to have a sense of the logic of a story, and I was never really sure what the rules were here. Oddly, the parts that really spoke to me best were the brief passages involving Neanderthals, sad strangers in the world who find no place for their distinct way of thinking, and have no hope of posterity because they’ve all been cloned sterile.

Lost In a Good Book is a very clever, very creative book, and you may enjoy it a lot. Cautions for some bad language, and for strange religious concepts.